Thursday, January 3, 2013

Happy 2013, plus Quilting Progress

It began snowing here at 8:00. Big, fluffy snowflakes.
According to the weather service, the snow is missing us--and 7 miles to the west, it's not falling.
But it's beautiful here.
I've been missing from my blog because we've had over two months of unreliable connectivity. I've been able to read for very brief periods--and I've tried posting a few comments from Sweet Teen's i-pad (much more complicated than using a keyboard), but otherwise I've just had to back off from the internet. Oh, how I miss my online friends!

I'm at the quilting stage of the Southwestern Sunrise-Sunset quilt, but it's not yet finished. Here's the "walnut" quilting in the blank blocks.....

and some of straight line quilting in the double Irish chain blocks.....

with a lot more still to be added. (Threads are from the basting that's not yet ready for complete removal.)

My maternal grandmother was amazingly superstitious and wanted a perfectly clean and tidy house for New Years Day. I came close--with a shiny sink (I do love my new sink!) and stove top and all the crucial laundry caught up--but not to the point that I'd want a photographer in my house. Sweet Teen spent New Year's Eve with a friend, but then they returned from Les Miserables so late that she decided to stay until yesterday afternoon. That worked out fine because it gave me the chance to meet up with a long-time friend for lunch yesterday. Today she met another friend to go see another movie in Albuquerque, so I'm watching the snow fall, trying to update my blog, and hoping to get more quilting done. Because of the presence of our Christmas tree, I moved the treadle to a different window, so I'm thinking that we'll take our tree down later today so I can move the treadle back to my bird-watching window.

Our schools don't re-open until Monday, so we've been enjoying our break and watching lots of movies. (One of my favorites was Amish Grace, although I cried almost all the way through it! One of the women at church suggested we get a group together to watch it. I don't think so! Public blubbering is definitely not something I want to do!) I've been doing quite a bit of fun cooking: beef bourguignon, chicken piccata, tortellini soup, turkey, several omelets, and cherry yogurt muffins, among other delights. No photos, so I'll skip posting recipes. Besides, with winter temperatures, I'll be doing quite a bit more cooking, although I'm still fascinated by the fact that cooking for people I love is so much fun despite the fact that I don't enjoy cooking for the sake of cooking.

I've finally joined The Quilting Board. My blog was getting a lot of hits from QB members who would then post questions on the quilting board about where I had copied patterns instead of just posting their questions on my blog. That's very disconcerting because I wasn't copying patterns from other people--and if I do, I will always give them credit. The thing is, I've been quilting so long that my first templates were made of oak tag and sand paper. I had to learn to look at quilts and draft the patterns. I was living in Peoria, IL at that time, and the big main branch of the library downtown had less than a dozen quilting related books. Therefore, to this day, although I've purchased dozens of books over the decades, almost every quilt I've made has been one I've designed myself, usually taking inspiration from vintage and antique quilts. Over the holidays I found not only a photograph of the 1903 Oklahoma quilt that inspired Southwestern Sunrise-Sunset, but also a photograph of the quilt I made in the late 80's and early 90's based on the 1903 quilt. I thought I had copied it exactly, but it turns out that I had done a variation for the border. Although the 1903 quilt was blue and white, this new quilt is a closer copy except it's colors are very different. When we can get the rest of our connectivity problems solved, I'll scan those photos of the 1903 quilt and the 1980's quilt and do a post about all three.

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